Finance Minister announces setting up of National Testing Service, a national nodal agency for higher educational reforms in the Union Budget 2017-18:

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley  presented the Union Budget 2017-18 in the lower house of the Parliament. He announced a slew of reforms that will affect the future of the higher educational Institutes providing them with higher autonomy. A National Testing Service (NTS) will be set up as a nodal agency. It would replace the work of all the existing agencies such as the CBSE, IIT, AICTE, etc. that currently conduct exams for admission to medical institutes, engineering colleges and business schools across the country.

Adding to this, the Finance Minister announced the setting up of an Innovation Fund for secondary education that would encourage local innovation, strengthen the Information and Communications Technology and encourage gender parity. This would augur well with the Government’s National Innovation Mission.  There would also be a system introduced for measuring annual learning in schools with special emphasis on Science.

Every year nearly 4 million students appear for seven different tests namely the CAT, JEE (Main), JEE (Advanced), GATE, CMAT, NEET, NET conducted by the CBSE, IITs, IIMs and AICTE.

For providing higher autonomy to the institutes of higher learning, a complete overhaul of the UGC has been proposed along with an outcome-based accreditation of educational institutions.

The finance minister has announced steps to boost the SWAYAM (Study Webs of Active-Learning for Young Aspiring Minds), a programme launched last year to offer online courses similar to MOOCs and also link them to 32 educational channels.

These measures have been taken by the government in order to upgrade the quality of both the school and technical and medical education.

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